Nikuv swap by-election voters roll days before voting start - it is that easy to rig the vote!

Information given to The Zimbabwean shows that an Israeli called Lior Hazan, who sources said worked for Nikuv International Projects, modified electronic data on the constituency rolls for the by-elections on March 14.

This modification occurred well after the Zimbabwe Electoral Commission had compiled the constituency rolls for the by-elections, but the sources said it indicated that he must have been the one who also sent an earlier version of the electronic roll samples for use in the pilot voter registration exercise for the two constituencies.

Apparently to make it difficult to follow the data, the files that were given for the by-election rolls are not ordinarily searchable as required by the constitution.

Said one of the sources, an expert on electoral matters: "The files have been presented in macro 'filters' that allow certain filtering within the file, but not across constituencies. In this case a comprehensive search is not possible in the format supplied by ZEC."

So here we have a foreign company, Nikuv, with a dubious vote rigging reputation issuing a voters roll that is deliberated block so that no one can search and extract information from. The law says it should be searchable but Nikuv deliberately issue the roll in the format that no one can search it.

And literally hours before voting is due to start the same Nikuv, willy-nilly, replaces the voters roll!

MDC factions have been calling for "alignment of electoral laws to the new Copac constitution" and the replacement of some of the people involved in the elections like ZEC chairperson Justice Rita Makarau. How would the firing of Justice Makarau stop Nikuv tampering with the voters roll? Even if ZEC assumed responsibility of the managing the voters roll, taking it away from the Registrar General's Office, how would ZEC stop Nikuv doing what it is doing right now?

The 2008 Global Political Agreement (GPA) called for the Government of National Unity (GNU) to implement a whole raft of democratic reforms design to end the overarching political influence of the Executive over the Police, ZEC, etc. None of these reforms were ever implemented. Not even one.

The GNU was also tasked to produce a new democratic constitution but failed to do so because the Copac constitution avoiding all the contentious issues that would have been addressed by the reforms if any had been implemented.

If we are serious about having free, fair and credible elections then we must go back to the democratic reforms agreed in the GPA and get them ALL properly implemented. We must disregard this piece-meal and rather confused MDC's approach of calling for electoral reforms knowing from the word-go these reforms will never ever deliver free and fair elections.

MDC have pointedly refused to call for the implementation of the democratic reforms agreed in the GPA because that they would, tacitly, acknowledge that they made a fatal politic mistake by failing to implemented even one reform. MDC betrayed the nation by failing to implement the reforms; we must not allow them to compound that betrayal by wasting time and resources messing around with the weak and feeble Copac constitution under the pretext that it alone still deliver free and fair elections.

zimbabwesocialdemocrats@gmail.com